The Polar Station Disappearances

If I'd known what waited for us inside DR9, I never would have said yes, not for 9,000 ahead, not for 90. My name's Sylvan Perran, and I've spent 15 years walking into places everyone else wants to forget. Dead plants shut down for reasons nobody ever explained, waiting for some fool to sign off and bring them humming back to life. This job was different, the money was too good, the contract came too fast, and there was something in the small print I never told my team. I got my crew together in under four hours. Limer, steady, numbers obsessed, never asked to see a single form. Foden, who handled every scrap of paperwork by hand ever since a lost terminal, cost her three weeks pay. Baptiste, barely 19, tagging along because his mother thought he needed real experience. Estelle flew the tender and hardly left her seat. I promised her she'd never have to set foot inside and I meant it back then. Here's the part I didn't share. The $9,000 only landed if we certified the plant. If we bailed, even for something small, we'd walk away with transit pay and nothing more. Closed six, right there in black and white if anyone bothered to look. DR-9 was carved into the ice of a nameless moon, mostly hidden below the surface, built for 300 but down to 60 by the time they shut it down. When you land, all you see is a blank apron and a smear of grey shapes vanishing under the ice. The whole place felt abandoned before we even stepped inside. Cavell fuels lost contact with the plant 19 days before we launched. No distress call, no request for evacuation, nothing in the logs that said what happened. That sounds weirder than it is. Sometimes plants just go quiet, a calm stack fails or a relay drops off the network. Then someone flies out and finds 40 people just annoyed about it. I'd been on two jobs like that and both times we were home in a week. The umbilical was pressurized and the air coming down it was warm and damp. Lamar put his palm flat on the inner hatch before opening it. He checked the temperature, 21 degrees on the other side, steady. As we walked in, the lights flicked on ahead of us, one section at a time. The plant was still running its usual schedule. Water moved overhead in the pipework. Somewhere deeper in, the extraction fans were spinning. Condensation built up on the inside of the outer wall, running down in streaks and pooling along the frame. The frame itself was so cold, there was a skin of ice at the edges of the puddles. But three feet from that, it was still 21 degrees. There was nobody there, honestly it wasn't even that dramatic. Coats hung on the pegs by the muster point, four of them, plus a work jacket. The rest of the pegs were empty, just a spare pair of gloves tossed on the shelf. The board still showed the shift rota from 19 days ago, nothing tacked over it, no note, no message, not even a scribble in the margin. The one had packed a bag, beds hadn't been stripped. I saw a mug on a windowsill outside the mess about an inch of whatever was inside, right to a ring. Bowden was the one who noticed the galley rack was warm. She found eleven trays in there, all sealed, hot enough that she pulled her hand back fast from the top one. She just stood there for a second, hand hovering in the air. "Eleven," she said. Lamar glanced at the rack, then at the control panel. "It's on a timer," he said, galley cycles twice a day, five in the morning, five in the afternoon. Bowden asked if that meant the plant had been running a full schedule every day for 19 days for 60 people who weren't even there. Lamar said yes, gave her the exact power draw. Bowden dug her printouts out of her bag and started checking each tray against the manifest because that's her job and nobody had told her to do it yet. O'Bare asked if the food was ours now. That was just the kind of question he'd ask. Said it right in front of everyone, no hesitation. Bowden told him she'd have to check how the stores were assigned. He nodded, shoved his hands in his pockets, and kept staring at the rack. Before putting anyone to work, I walked the spine of the plant. That's just my habit, I want to know the space myself before I start making plans. The spine on DR-9 is a long corridor running the plant's length about 260 meters from mustard point to the far end. It's the main way everyone got around. About two-thirds down, I noticed a track worn into the deck. The floors covered in this gray, non-slip coating they lay in strips. It takes years to wear through. But here, right down the center, there was a path about as wide as one person, and the gray was worn away, down to the bare metal, which was shiny and bright. No where else was the floor like that. I followed the track because it was there. It kept going for about 40 meters, dead straight, and ended at a bulkhead. The bulkhead was blank, no hatch, no frame, no seal, no hinge, just a wall, nothing said into it, nothing painted. The track ran right up to it. Then it just stopped. The mare came down, shined his light at an angle, and gave me a depth reading. About a millimeter and a half through the coating, and the coating itself was two millimeters thick. I figured they must have redone the partitions at some point. 19 years is a long time for a plant to stay the same. I'd done a job in the belt where they walled off a hatch, and people kept walking the old route for a year after. We went back up the corridor to the mess, and I put the four of them on the shift at six. The plant kept running as if 60 people were still there, drawing the same power the whole time we stayed. Lamar flagged it the first night, I logged it, and neither of us pressed the issue. It was an automated plant, it just kept it scheduled. Most of a restart job is just walking. You don't jump in and turn things back on right away. You walk the place, write down what's running, and what isn't, and figure out which blueprints are lying to you. When you sign off, section by section, and the operator gets a piece of paper saying a real person actually checked each part. DR9's whole job is pulling ice off the surface and melting it. That's it, industrially speaking. There are two meltholes where the ice rides in on a conveyor and drops into hoppers. Then, there's a set of settling tanks to let the grit drop out of the hot water. After that, the water runs through the filter galleries. What comes out the other side is water for the pipeline, and deuterium the operator can sell. The meltholes are the noisiest places in the whole plant, and the filter galleries are always wet. Everything drips in there. You walk down the center walkway, handrail on each side, with about 400 meters of filter housings, stretching away on either side. The whole time, something up above, is dripping down the back of your collar. Lemare signed off on the plant's condition on our second morning. Pressures were where they needed to be, the melt system was cycling, and the only problem he logged was a busted heater in the #2 wash compartment. I've read nine years of his logs and never once seen him write a feeling in one. What sticks with me is the scale. That plant was built for 300 people, but 60 were doing the work. You could see exactly where those 60 went. There were footpaths everywhere, not worn through, like the one in the main corridor, just clean paths in a place that was otherwise grey and dusty with condensation. A scuffed spot at the bottom of every ladder where people always stepped off. The whole place was like a map of where 60 people actually bothered to go, and most of it, they didn't bother with it all. It's funny, I'd seen the same thing once before, on a plant way out in the outer line. Didn't mean much. We ate in the galley that second night, I'd give a lot to get that evening back. Lemare started in on the recirculation pump. Number four, on the melt side, he'd first told me that pump was on its last legs back on the very age job. He rattled off the vibration numbers and what they should have been. Told me the bearing was shot, and when it finally gave out, it had taken the seal with it and flood the deck. I said we'd write it up for Kovell. They won't fix it, he said. They haven't in 19 years. Obert circled back to the food, he'd clearly been hung up on it since day one. He asked about it while he was eating, standing at the counter with a tray and one. hand. I don't think I ever saw him actually sit down to eat, not on the tender, not in the galley. Bowden put her printouts down and gave him the full explanation. She said foodstores on a facility are assigned to the operator's account as inventory. Contract crews get a separate per-dem ration. If operations are suspended, inventory doesn't just become the contractors unless there's a specific instruction. Clause 11 covers what happens if you're stuck there for a while but there's a daily limit per person. She told him the exact number, and because the inventory hadn't been officially suspended, technically, the 11 trays still belonged to the 60 people who weren't there. She'd log what we used under Clause 11, sorted all out at the end and it would probably be fine. Obert just said, "So can I eat it or not?" Bowden said it depends. He shrugged and said he'd already had, too. Marshawn chimed in over the open channel from the tender, saying the coffee out there was even worse. She kept that line open the whole time we were on DR9. There was a speaker in the galley and one in the mess, so you'd always hear the air moving on her end, or her chair creaking. Sometimes she'd say something, sometimes she'd go quiet for a couple hours. Lamar said the coffee tasted bad because of the filter, not the beans. The galley used water from the same recycled loop as the wash compartments and you could taste it. Bowden said it was the beans. She said she'd had those same beans on three different stations, which with a different loop and they always tasted just as bad. Lamar said that was because it was both the beans and the loop. Obert wanted to know what a loop was. The loop right Marshawn chimed in over the speaker. Then she added that she'd had worse coffee once on a rig where they pushed it through a hose. Nobody won the argument. We must have been in there 40 minutes, maybe an hour. I couldn't tell you now. Obert finished the trays, but Amberi herself back in her printouts. Lamar went off to check number four again. The whole conversation just fizzled and that's the last memory I have of the four of them all together in a room. That night the hatches started acting up. I didn't hear anything. Lamar did. He was up around two working on that wash compartment heater. He came to me at six the next morning with a set of numbers and that's how I know exactly what happened. Four hatches in the section three compartments aft of where we were sleeping. He had the actuation count, the power draw, the timing, said the draw matched the handle, not the automated system. I asked him what that meant. On DR9 you can open a hatch two ways. The plant can cycle it automatically for pressure and the system logs that is a system actuation. Or someone inside can pull the handle, the interior override, and that gets logged differently. The draw is different since the handle does most of the work and the motor just helps out. Four interior overrides. Two in the morning. Lamar said the melt side had been equalizing all night and a hatch will open itself if the pressure seals soft. There are more than 60 hatches on the plant and everyone is 19 years old. He figured it was probably a solenoid going bad. I told him to write it up. We spent our third day working on the settling tanks. That night it happened again, further aft. I didn't check the logs myself. Lamar gave me the counts each morning. I wrote them down and we went to work. He'd already checked them. He's the best engineer I've ever worked with and he'd given me a reason. The plant lost contact 19 days before we launched. That number sticks with me because of those trays. 19 days of the galley heating up 11 trays at 5 in the morning and 5 in the afternoon, then dumping them, then doing it all over again. Lamar pulled the full hatch log on the fourth morning. The solenoid theory wasn't enough. He wanted the actual hatch number so he could open it up and take a look. That's his way. Get the theory, then check the hardware. He came and found me in the number 1 melt hall and brought me down to show me. He didn't say a word on the way. After 12 contracts together, that was the first time he'd ever walked me somewhere without telling me up front what I was about to see. It wasn't a list of faults. Faults are random. You get one hatch here, another on the far side of the plant an hour later, no pattern because a soft seal doesn't care where it is. This wasn't random. This was one hatch, then the next along, then the next after that. Every time it was the interior override, all the way through the plant. The hatch frames on DR9 are spaced between 18 and 34 meters apart depending on the section and he'd lined up the two columns on the terminal so I could see it. He'd worked out the speed somewhere between 4 and 5 kilometers an hour. He said that someone walking slowly. And then he stopped talking. He'd said what the numbers said and the numbers didn't say anything else. Bowden was standing at the end of the bench, arms folded, staring at the screen, then at me, but she kept quiet too. I said it must be around. Big plants like this run automated inspection rounds, a cart, a rail unit, something that goes from section to section, logging its progress. When a plant gets shut down, nobody remembers to turn the round off because it's harmless. I'd seen a rail unit at a mothballed refinery run for 11 months after the last person left. Lamar said DR9 didn't have a rail. Maybe it just wasn't on the drawings. She knew exactly what the interior override draw meant. She read the same screen I did and she reads better than I do. She just stood there, arms crossed, then she picked up her printouts and went back to work because I was the boss I'd made a call and there was still a job to do. We found it that afternoon in the filter gallery. There's a machinery space off the West gallery about 4 meters by 6 with the two backwash pumps in it and a gap between the number one housing and the outer bulkhead where the pipe runs come through. The gap is maybe half a meter wide. We had the working lights on in there, full lights, every fitting burning. There wasn't a shadow in that room. It was standing in the gap. At first I thought it was a bundle of hoses somebody had jammed back there years ago. That's what my brain wanted it to be. Then it stayed wrong. Pale, grey white, the color of flesh that's lived too long underwater. Its surface wasn't smooth. It sagged in folds and ridges that looked wet even though nothing dripped from it. Here and there the skin split into dark seams that opened just enough to suggest depth before closing again into wrinkles. The gap wasn't even half a meter across but whatever it was filled it completely without looking compressed. One end disappeared behind the pump housing, the other vanished into the pipe penetration in the bulkhead. It never moved or breathed. O'Bear spoke first. Jesus, nobody answered him. A few seconds later he said "quieter". What the hell is that? Lamar didn't take his eyes off it. I don't know. Go down whispered, "I think I'm about to throw up." Then O'Bear said the only thing anyone was thinking. Could that be why they're gone? I remember wanting to tell him no but couldn't. We stood there for perhaps 90 seconds for grown adults in a machinery room staring at something that should not have fitted inside it. Then, without anybody giving an order, we started backing out exactly the way we'd come in. One step at a time. Lamar reached the door last and pulled it shut without ever turning his back on the thing. We'd just found something that had no right to exist. Nobody talked about calling Covell and nobody even suggested going back in. We just stood there on the gallery with the filters humming behind the bulkhead, listening to water drip through the pipework. After a while he looked at me instead. So, were leaving? That's the moment. Everything that happened after came out of what I said next. I said no. Whatever that thing was, it hadn't suddenly arrived while we were there. It had already been part of that station before the first hatch on our tender opened. Then I said two more days. That evening, Bedan went out to reconcile the tank inventory. That was her job and nobody else could have done it. Each tank is logged individually and the manifest lists them by number so she had to touch every single plate and read it herself. That meant walking the whole settling floor end to end and then all the way down the east gallery. Further than any of the rest of us went that day. She checked out on the board at 19 minutes past six. She took her printouts, a torch, and the big T-flask, the one she only brought if she expected it to be gone for three hours or more. She didn't come back. We didn't try to search the whole plant. Three people with flashlights against hundreds of meters of gallery, 60 tanks, and two melt halls. It would have taken a week. Instead we checked the logs. Lamar had the records up in less than ten minutes. Every hatch Bowden had passed through in order with the times. Muster pointed six-nineteen into the east gallery at six thirty-five. Then the tank plates, one frame after another down the line, twelve, fifteen, nineteen minutes apart, which made sense if you're stopping to read a number and jot it down. The last entry was frame thirty-one at eight minutes past nine. That's what I have written down. Nothing after that. We went out to frame thirty-one with the printout. The hatch was closed. Past it, the gallery stretched on, lights bright, filters running, the walkway empty as far as you could see. No torch, no satchel, no papers, no sign on the deck, flask showed up upright, lid screwed on, two thirds full. By about two thirty, I'd put the three of us in the mess, hatch closed. That night the sequence didn't go to the bunk corridor. This time it came up the spine and turned down the east gallery, stopping at frame thirty-one. We had calms the whole time, but I didn't call it in, and at six the next morning I sent Lamar and O'Bare back to the west gallery. The R9's uplink was dead, that's why Cavell lost contact in the first place. The plant's calm stack had failed 19 days before, and nobody had come out to fix it because there were 60 people on site, and they'd get a tech out eventually. So everything we logged, we had to file through the tender. Every evening I'd carry the day's certification pages down the umbilical to the Odette, and Marshawn would send them up on the ship's uplink. I'd sign her log, then walk back, every evening, nine minutes down, nine minutes back. I was in the west gallery when she called. Lamar was working on number two backwash, O'Bare was out on the walkway with the tally sheet, filters were running, and I had to walk up to the gallery head just to hear her properly. Say that again, there's something in the aft passage, it's forward of the aft hatch about level with the store lockers. I'm in the mess, so it was between her and the flight deck. The whole layout of the Odette, aft hatch, then the passage, then the flight deck up front. No other way out, and then there was just the sound of the ship behind her. Does Estelle has it moved at all since you saw it? No, not once. Lamar had come up behind me on the walkway, O'Bare was there too, neither of them said anything and I didn't turn around. I told her to get to the flight deck, that's what I said. Get to the flight deck and dog the hatch. On a no-dead class you can dog the flight deck hatch from inside, or dogs, manual, and nothing on the ship can open it once they're down. It was the right call. I'd give the same order again. Then she said, "It's in the passage, Sylvain," and I told her I knew. I told her the four of us had stood in a bright room with that thing for a minute and a half, and it hadn't moved. Go past it, get forward, dog the hatch. She was quiet for a bit, then she said, "All right." Then she said, "Talk to me while I do it." So I talked to her. I read her the tally of O'Bare's sheet since it was in front of me. I said something about number four still running after six years of Limerah cursing it. I said her name a few times just to keep the line alive. She answered, "Quick, clipped replies, always starting with the last three words I'd just said. She'd done that for as long as I'd known her. Echo you, then actually answer. How far forward are you?" I asked. A pause. Still going? Estelle. "I'm fine." Almost cheerful, and I stood at the head of the West Gallery, handset to my ear, filters running behind me and set her name again. Nothing. I just kept saying her name, asking her to answer, and after a while I was just holding on to the handset for something to do. The channel stayed open. I could hear the tender's air moving, and what was probably the aft-hatch seal ticking. I'd promised her she wouldn't have to set foot inside that plant. Nobody warned us about it coming the other way. The aft passage was empty. Nothing between the lockers and the hull. Nothing on the deck. Not a single mark. The flight deck hatch was dogged, all four dogs down, tight from the inside. I stood in front of it and called through. I put my ear right up to the metal. Then I got the emergency spindle out of the locker and took the dogs off from the outside. It takes about six minutes and makes a hell of a racket, and I opened it. The Odette was all lit up, everything running, air moving, board green, her seat cover folded over the chair arm, just like she always left it. The flight deck was empty. Her headset was on the console. I sat in her chair for a while. I couldn't tell you how long. Then I got up and walked back down the umbilical to the plant. Limer and Obert were in the west gallery, and somebody had to tell them. He knew it, and I knew it, and neither of us said it. The bulkhead was Limer's idea, and he didn't go after it because he wanted to see what was behind it. He went after it because of the log. By then, he'd been reading the sequences every night, and he'd spotted something I hadn't. Whatever came up that corridor every night was coming through a hatch with nothing on the other side. He told me all this standing in the mess, holding the print out, using that flat tone he keeps for numbers. When he said we had a plasma cutter in the tender's locker and he gave me the specs, thickness, amp draw, about 40 minutes work. He didn't ask if we should do it. He just laid out what it would take and waited. That's the only call during the whole contract that wasn't mine. It took an hour and ten, maybe an hour and a half. I wasn't watching the time by then. In the wall, there wasn't a room, just a crawl space running off at a right angle from the spine, maybe two feet high, not quite a meter wide, and it ran further than our lights could reach. The floor was polished bright, not scuffed, not with a path worn down the center, just clean the whole way, edge to edge, like the head of an old hammer. It stayed bright as far as we could see, then curved out of sight. The badges were right there. Station ID cards, the clip on kind on lanyards and belt reels, just scattered on the shiny floor, just loose, like coins at the back of a drawer. I picked one up. The lanyard was fine, clip worked, but the face was blank, no photo, no name, no number, no barcode. Everything worn away, polished, smooth, not scratched or burned, just erased, same as the floor. I checked four or five more, all the same. I started counting badges, got past 60 and stopped. There was a key mixed in, small brass thing, like for a front door on a split ring with nothing else. O'Bear went that night, he was in the bunk corridor when I turned in. By six, he was gone. He never did mark the board, so that told me nothing. His bunk was exactly the same, near as I could tell, nothing of his was missing or disturbed. I didn't see any marks on the deck, and I didn't hear a thing, and I was just two doors down with my hatch closed. Nothing after that. Lamar went the next night. He did mark the board, ten past four, east gallery, nothing under the time in column. I stuck around the plant for one more day. I'm not even going to try to explain that, because honestly, I can't. I know I went back to the crawlspace and just stood there at the entrance. On the eighth day, I undocked around nine. There's a whole day I skipped. The third day, I only mentioned it in passing, you know, the bit about the settling tanks, that's not actually what mattered about that day. Bodhan came into the galley around four in the afternoon, holding a print out. I'd known about clause six long before we ever left port, the fine print stating that if we didn't finish the job, nobody got paid. Though I kept that detail to myself. It wasn't until the third day that Bodhan uncovered it. She laid the paperwork out on the table and asked if I'd known to which I admitted I did. They all turned to look at me then, clearly waiting for me to make the call, to tell them to pack up and head home. Instead, I just looked at the clock and told them our shift started in 45 minutes, and just like that, the decision was made. After that they started disappearing one-by-one, first Bodhan, then Mushon, followed by O'Bear, and finally Lamar. How exactly they vanished as anyone's guess, but frankly, I didn't care enough to find out. I could have walked away after the first one went missing, or even after the second, but I stayed put. By the time the third was gone, the contract was nearly finished anyway, and by the fourth, well, there was only me left. "Look of the draw, I guess." So I pushed through to the end, finishing the inspections, and signing off on the remaining sections until DR9 was officially certified. Only then did I leave. Covell called while I was still on the return flight. The representative on the line sounding as if she'd already checked out and moved on to the next contract. "Mr. Pere, I just need to confirm a few details before we process payment," she said briskly. "I told her to go ahead. The certifications complete? It is. And you're crew? They stayed behind," I said smoothly. They wanted to finish packing up and plan to catch the next tender. There was a brief pause on the line. "They're still on station then. I'll note that." "Just keep in mind the station's comms are still down," I added. "You'll have to wait until the relay is repaired before anyone can reach them directly." She acknowledged this with another quiet pause followed by the rhythmic clack of typing. "Understood. The station is operational. No safety concerns?" "Excellent," she replied. "Your completion bonus will be transferred within three business days." I thanked her and the call ended. A few weeks later, Covell called one final time. It wasn't about the job, though. It was about Baptiste O'Bare. His mother had been asking questions trying to figure out why her son hadn't come home. "We told her what you told us," the woman said, her voice flat. That the crew stayed behind and that they'd be returning on the next tender. I kept quiet letting the silence stretch between us. She's refusing to accept it. She noted after a moment. I suppose she would. She paused again, likely waiting for something I wasn't going to give her before finally wrapping up the call. Thank you for your time, Mr. Puran. The line went dead. $48,000 for eight days of work. I'd take that contract again in a heartbeat. Hey guys, Rex here. Before I let you go, I just wanted to take a second to say a genuine thank you for sticking around all the way to the end. If this one did it for you, I'd love for you to drop a like and leave a comment if you're watching on YouTube or hit that follow button and leave a five-star rating if you're listening over on Spotify. It really helps keep the channel going and is a huge deal for smaller creators. Take care of yourself out there. Stay safe and good night.